IF, as Tony Blair says, we are all middle class now, the Middle England that New Labour has pandered to with tax promises may, in Lancashire at least, begin to think it has got a poor trade for such progress if being better off means being worse off in terms of vital public services.

For now firemen are being sacked and the police force, heading for a multi-million-pound budget crisis, is staring at cuts too.

How can it be maintained that the homes and lives of Lancashire's taxpayers will be no less safe when these cuts inevitably mean a reduction in the fire service's cover and may yet do with that of the police?

The reason for this is that the government has not given local authorities in Lancashire enough money.

The fire service as got £5.5 million less than it needs. The police may have to make a staggering £5 million-worth of cuts in the coming year and £9 million-worth in the years ahead.

On the ground, that means 25 part-time firefighters - ten from Accrington alone - are being axed. And though the police promise to make the cuts in administration, rather than the front line, the force will be clearly under strain. It all, of course, clearly flows from the government's anti-tax and spend policy with which it wooed voters and put itself into a financial straitjacket.

But one wonders how many tax-conscious middle class voters are content with the consequences of Labour borrowing Tory clothes and, as the Conservatives did year after year, squeezing local government funding so that the cuts are going so close to the bone that now their homes and property and possibly their lives and those of their families may be jeopardised.

From the fire service, we have a pledge that these cuts will not make any difference. They had better be right.

And Home Secretary Jack Straw, who has the last word on these job cuts, will do well, we think, to play safe and ensure that he and the rest of Middle England can sleep safe in Lancashire.

For this may be a cut too far.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.